Books About Financial Crashes, Panics, Bailouts and Meltdowns

Back in October, Martin Mayer described his five favorite books on financial meltdowns to the Wall Street Journal. One that has since remained timely: Irvine H. Sprague’s Bailout (Basic Books, 1986). Mayer told the Journal:

“Bailout is a superbly honest first-person account of the big bank traumas of the 1980s, written by a long-term director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Irvine H. Sprague lived through it all – the collapse of Commonwealth Bank of Detroit, First Pennsylvania of Philadelphia, Penn Square of Oklahoma City, Seafirst of Seattle, Commonwealth of Chicago. … He wrote the book, he says, to show how banking regulators make decisions, and after reading Bailout we do in fact know more about how the sausage got to be sausage. He leaves us with a question: ‘Should megabanks continue to receive favored treatment?’”

Mayer also recommended Charles P. Kindleberger’sManias, Panics, and Crashes (Basic Books, 1978), Stephen Fay’s Beyond Greed (Viking, 1982), Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed (Random House, 2000) and James Grant’s The Trouble With Prosperity at online.wsj.com/article/SB122367719361224329.html. And Steve Fraser deals with financial crashes and panics as part of his brief and well-written new history of Wall Street Wall Street: America’s Dream Palace (Yale University Press, 2008) www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2008/10/27/.